Remember this name: Betelgeus. In the past, man looked up to the sky for explanations. With primitive technology, he managed to map across the stars and in the firmament he discovered the constellations, the most famous being Orion. In Orion you can see different stars, which according to what was believed at the time gave them fortune, explained celestial movements and anticipated natural phenomena.
These are bright stars hundreds of light-years away (one light-year equals 9.5 billion kilometers) whose brightness reaches us much later.
With this in mind, imagine that in the past, our ancestors, guided by these lights in the firmament, saw that one of them began to shine brighter and brighter. That suddenly stays on like the sun, but without going out at night, illuminating the Earth for weeks, if not months. This is what we could experience next.
In the constellation of Orion is Betelgeuse, a variable red supergiant. It is believed to have a radius of about 1,400 times that of our Sun and is between 450 and 600 light years distant. Despite his young age (8 million years) he is about to die, or maybe he has already died and we don’t know.
When a star like Betelgeuse dies, it becomes a supernova and although, thanks to the distance, it would not affect us greatly, the light of the catastrophe would reach us, however, it is precisely because of the distance at which it is found that it does not we know if that can happen soon, in a few hundred or thousands of years or even if it’s already a supernova and we’re just waiting for the light to come.
Imagine that one day at night the sky lights up as if you had the moon and also another full moon, but brighter. That hours later, during the day, the light from that star continues to shine and that for months there seem to be two suns in our solar system. That’s what we can expect if we get to experience the death of Betelgeuse anytime soon.
Crab supernova
What we have just described sounds amazing. However, this would not be the first time it has happened. Around the year 1054, a similar phenomenon occurred. According to texts by Chinese and Arab astronomers, the light from a supernova, better known as the Crab supernova, was visible for 653 nights. It is even believed that temples built by Native Americans in what is now the United States were completed more quickly due to this event.
The most surprising thing is that it is believed that light reached Earth a thousand years ago, but that the explosion actually happened about eight millennia ago. Imagine what this event meant to the whole world, today, with all the technology and stellar knowledge, we know we shouldn’t worry, but there are certainly many groups that would interpret this as a balance or cosmic strangeness.
Although the space agencies have assured that nothing can happen to us, other than having light for a few weeks or months, this is an event that is really expected, since it would be unique, not only in life, but for many more generations.